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Keerim Kim completed Assignment 08

Patricia Hill Collins describes how “outsiders” contribute to society and culture. She points out an interesting view about people having “outsider within” status. According to Collins, experience of black women as outsiders, highlights tension in a powerful insider community. Living in “outsider within status” is a brutal form of existence. On one level, that status gave benefits to black women. They were seen as domestic, nurturing and caring. Therefore, in positive views, they could gain self-affirmation in white families. However, on the other hand, there were invisible walls between white families and black women, and they could never belong to them. They suffered from dilemma in self, family, society issues and the reality was often obscured by orthodox. It is shown that somehow they were in both “outside in” and “inside out” status and experienced nearness and remoteness at the same time. In her article, it shows that it is not only black women that were suffering from “outsider within” status. White women were also treated as inferior in homes. However, according to the article, if white women were considered as dogs to their male members of the house, black women were considered as mules. The oppression was in different forms for each group, but they were both treated as subordinate and dehumanized. Also, black men were fighting for their rights as they were suffering from discriminated in society. However, they shared some space with white men because they had commonality as having “manhood.” Black women were in the bottom of the hierarchy because they could not be in the same category as white males, who dominated the society. Therefore black feminism was for both racial and sexual equality. By Collins’s article, it could be inferred that multifaceted oppression that inferior insiders went through has obscure marginality. Any member of society could be inside that group in some sense. However, as black feminist thoughts express that by creating their own self-definition and self-valuation, they should be able to gain denied authority back.